Prepare to clutch those pearls -- I've been censored. I posted some of my old student life-drawings on Photobucket only to discover that three of them had been deleted for TOS violations. Another was deleted the following day.

(The remainder may be found in my Scrapbook under My Artwork => Life Drawings.)

While you all fetch your smelling salts and attempt to recover, allow me to rant. I noticed that the deleted images seemed to be the frontal ones, while the rear views remained (at least for the nonce). I complained about it to Ignoble Bard, who egged me into writing Photobucket Support for a clarification of what was and wasn't inappropriate.

Here is what I wrote:

May I have some clarification on your terms of service/prohibited contentconcerning 'nudity'? I posted several photos of my old student artwork for myfriends to see. About eight of them were life drawings -- no detail, nogenitalia, basic line drawings. Four of them were deleted, three yesterday, onetoday. Do you have people who judge content or was this some kind of bot?

Should I remove the rest of the drawings before I get into trouble? I didn'tconsider line drawings to be 'nudity'.

And here is what I got back from them:

Your account contained images which violate our Terms of Use. These Terms apply to all users regardless of the Public/Private setting of the account. When you created the account, you agreed to abide by these terms and we clearly explained the consequences of violating those terms.

Photobucket.com attempts to maintain a website that is absent of offensive, indecent or objectionable content. That is our general policy and your images were removed in accordance with that policy. The Photobucket.com Terms of Use, found at http://www.photobucket.com/terms, reflect that policy by giving Photobucket the right to remove content that, among other things, (a) it deems unlawful, obscene, harmful, threatening, defamatory, or hateful; (b) invades the privacy of any third party; (c) contains nudity, illustrated nudity, pornography, illustrated pornography, child erotica, or child pornography; or (d) Photobucket deems otherwise objectionable.

Sincerely,

Your Photobucket Support Team

All well and good, except they didn't answer my question about who makes the judgments (human or bot) or whether I should remove the remainder of the drawings, which were just as nude as the deleted ones. As for 'clear' explanations, the link provided lists, under 8.Content/Activity Prohibited:

Note, nothing is said about illustrated nudity that could be considered 'art' rather than 'porn'. I'm no Picasso, but there can be found on the net, on respectable sites, line drawings by him that are racier than anything I had posted. (In fact, I seem to recall one with a minotaur -- but I digress. LOL) All I wanted was an answer to my question, not another canned lecture.

The upshot is that I'm miffed with Photobucket. This means I'm shifting all my fandom related graphics to my Live Journal scrapbooks and taking my photographs to another image hosting site. For now, I'll have my art-related things here at my Scrapbook, but I'm considering a DeviantArt account.